[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[cu11]

Apologies for my images - i have no idea how to resize them down thought the site might of done it for me.

I too having difficulties - im quite proficiate at finding my way around photoshop.. but theres one part that confuses me.

IT says:

20. You should have 6 layers; from top to bottom: “base”, “mountains” and “hills” (all hidden) then “land”, “ocean” and “background” (all visible) and you should still be on the “land” layer. Now we have our basic elevations set up so let’s add some color.
21. Ctrl-click on the “base” layer (in the layers palette) to load it as a selection (in newer versions of Photoshop you have to ctrl-click on the thumbnail in the layers palette). Select > Inverse then hit the delete key then deselect.

At 20 i was like thats correct ! Then 21 throws me.


So i apply the gradient... after deselecting and yet it affects the ocean rather than the land..i knew it was going to happen from read the in steps but not until i saw your picture at stage 22 that some thing is a miss.

Can you explain what i got wrong?

[Ascension]

Well, first off, you're missing two layers - the Land layer and the Mountains layer - so you must have skipped a few steps. When done correctly you should be on the Land layer, the Base layer should be a big white landmass (black is the ocean) so when you ctrl-click on the Base layer and Select - Inverse and delete you end up deleting the ocean from the Land layer. As for the uploading, click on "Go advanced", scroll down to "Manage attachments" and click on that, then use thingamabob to upload your image as an attachment.

[cu11]

Oh yeah i went back a few steps than took the picture but kept the images of the layers that i got wrong.

The pure white land was becomes a difference cloud when i merge the layer with base how ever which is where it goes wrong for me.

This part:
10. When happy, duplicate this layer (it will be named “ocean copy”) and click on the “base” layer. Link the “base” and “ocean copy” layers together; on the layer palette you will see a box with an eye and a box with a brush in it – the brush means that this is the active layer and the eye means that the layer is visible. If you click in an empty box a chain will appear...this is the link. Once the layers are linked then merge down (ctrl+e) or Layer > Merge down.

[Ascension]

The base layer should be filled with 50% gray (not 50% opacity but true medium gray - RGB of 128, 128, 12 and the blend mode should be hard mix. So what you should see would be what I call cow spots. And when you merge down, since there should be no problem now, everything turns out fine. Then you delete the black ocean and the base layer has the white continents on it. Then you use that base layer for the later steps.

[MediocreMemory]

I loved this tutorial so much, I made a script for cs4 to get it done quicker. The steps are in order of the tutorial and the stops are for the hand drawn parts. I also added an action that creates a height map from the image. Thank you so much for sharing your tutorial!

[ Action Script Download ]

[Ascension]

Thanks for making the action - I never got around to doing it.

[Lord_Infinitus]

I did Giddies Version, I kinda like GIMP more than Photoshop.

I can add a few warnings:
If you mess with the colorslider wrongly to prevent overwhitening in the northern region you get the whitened areas in the desert. I still don't know correctly when this happened, but the same problem occurs with the mountains, I overbrushed the with the color, and well... you see it on the image.

it was late at night and i probably wasn't paying full attention, but the mountain problem and the salt-desert problem popped up at a quite late step, I actually noticed them only the next day... maybe it is because I suck at brushing.

Maybe I was to groggy.

Anyways thanks you two. In complement with the techniques RobA and the Photorealistic Forest-Guy presented, they are very instructive and the whole tutorials are awesome.

After doing standard GIMP tuts, I thought I might try these ones... well they are a treasure for everyone, not only for cartographers, thanks.

[Ascension]

That looks nice, I dig it a lot. If you want to go back over the deserts then create a new layer and paint some color in and mess with the blend modes or opacity.

[Lord_Infinitus]

Well, this one was primarily thought for testing out the tutorial. Whereas I noted: Paintbrush over the mountains after you adjusted the color.
Thanks for the additional tips. But for a final map I am sure to use a diagonal line instead of the horizontal one to adjust it, because you can get more stuff in there.
I don't know when I have time to do another map, but it is the next one I will do. Probably you might want to add a method to extract single countries from the map, to create a regional map of them.

and I noticed another thing, if you choose a not rectangular map in GIMP, you will have to scale the two noise sizes when generating solid noise.
So if you are doing 2000 x 1200, and the solid noise generation says 9 and 9, you will have to do 9 and 5.4; it is to keep the ratios, so your clouds won't look streched.

[Ancient]

First of all, it is a VERY FANTASTIC Tutorial, surely one of the best (including the results) i've stubmled over so far. Just a question, i don't know if I made a mistake.

- After creating the landmass (step 9 in the word document) my coastlines look as such in closeup:



- You usually don't notice that if zoomed out, however zooming in because not so pretty.
- Any idea how to "smoothen" the coastlines using some sort of filter? I tried a while, but neither result made me happy. Anyone any ideas?